Newsletter 28 – Deep Learning with TensorFlow

Deep Learning with TensorFlow

Jeff Dean is a Google legend. He’s currently leading the Google Brain project so this recent lecture he gave at YCombinator on Large Scale Deep Learning is both important and fascinating. It provides a unique glimpse into what Google think the future will be about. Namely the application of deep learning to a far greater range of problems with an especial focus on the use of sequence to sequence techniques for language translation.

Dean promotes TensorFlow heavily and for good reason, citing the huge developer momentum behind the platform:

Mobile

WhatsApp was among the first apps to equate your account with your phone number. Now apps like Snapchat, Twitter, and Facebook Messenger do it too. Starting this fall, setting up your iPhone will be as easy as punching in your number. The supposedly super-secure way of logging into apps involves texting you a secret code to verify your identity. Phone numbers are killing the username, killing the password, and making it easier than ever to go wild online. So guard it with your life, because it is your life.

Amazon

Most people are on board with streaming and good luck to them. But for a variety of reasons there were a few of us who held out. We’ll miss Lovefilm and those silly little envelopes, even if they did make our friends laugh at us.

Alphr.com on the politics of Trump’s beef with Bezos. In the real world Amazon is creating 100,000 jobs in the US alone this year with many thousands of others in countries like the UK. No other retailer comes close in terms of innovation and ambition. What this is about is the Bezos-owned Washington Post being a constant thorn in Trump’s side leading to clumsy attempts to link the two:

Amazon is doing great damage to tax paying retailers. Towns, cities and states throughout the U.S. are being hurt – many jobs being lost!

Services

Smart lock maker Lockstate had just one job. It failed abysmally judging by this email sent from it’s CEO to its customers:

“We are sorry to inform you about some unfortunate news. Your lock is among a small subset of locks that had a fatal error rendering it inoperable. After a software update was sent to your lock, it failed to reconnect to our web service making a remote fix impossible”